~chuck/blog

I love Ubuntu. It’s Linux that you can plug in and use quickly, without a whole lot of setup time. I even convinced my Uncle Phil and my Grandmother-in-law to use it, and they are die-hard Windows fans.

Well, wow. My first impression once I got Hardy installed was that the new modern art deco background is a far reach from their traditional “wiggly lines” art.

I think I like it.

I also very much like the fact that my graphics card, which is an ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M (integrated) is supported by the xorg-driver-fglrx package (which it wasn’t in Gutsy) and that I was able to get my transparent terminals (which is the best feature of OpenGL) without a whole heck of a lot more than a reboot.

All in all, I have been impressed thus far, after using it for about an hour.

They’ve done some work on the “Search and Indexing” with trackerd. I have noticed that it is a TON faster, and that my hard disk is not thrashing near as much as it did with Gutsy.

One thing I am overly unimpressed with is that somehow, the combination of “Shift+Space” keeps changing my keyboard layout and character set to “Amheric”, which seems to be the first in a list of char sets. I haven’t figured out how to completely kill it yet, but at the Ubuntu forums, I found an article that suggested killing the Hotkeys. This seems to have fixed the issue, as one of the hotkeys was “Shift+Space”. I hit that a lot on carryover.

So, after that, it seems I’ve got things about configured the way I want them. Thus far I’m impressed with everything, except the fact that I still may have to install ATI’s proprietary driver (not from the Ubuntu repo package) in order to be able to properly resume from suspend.

Oh, well. All in a day’s work.

/cs

UPDATE 080309: I ended up installing ATI’s proprietary driver using the instructions for Gutsy (but the packages for Hardy) at cchtml’s wiki but to no avail. Suspend is still broken. I am reinstalling from scratch and want to try to do without my transparent terminals to see what Ubuntu does as far as patching for the driver. There was an update for xorg-driver-fglrx, but it broke my config. (It wouldn’t have been hard to boot to single-user mode and dpkg –reconfigure xserver-xorg, but why not start fresh, right?) Anyway. I said I’d update, and I did. /cs

UPDATE 080316: OK, so it’s been an up and down road.  I am either able to suspend (which I find essential on a laptop) or have GL effects, which give me transparent terminals (which is just ideal in general).  I downloaded the daily build and reinstalled today.  More tweeking will *hopefully* yield promising results.  /cs

UPDATE 080317: OK – up and down has finally leveled out.  I have found a workaround for fglrx and sleep in Hardy.  Hoorah.  /cs

UPDATE 080319: I completely forgot – there is a bug in synergy (or xorg, not sure which) in Hardy that causes problems with synergy use.  The workaround for this (as documented in the Ubuntu forums) is to run ’sudo synergyc –options’.  The problem does not manifest itself in synergys.  NOTE: This should be done on a network you trust, and behind a swith or router. synergy is known to leak information.  /cs

UPDATE 080407: So far so good.  Hardy is now into Beta status, and will be released in 17 days. I have had minimal problems, either with updates or with running the system.  Thus far, this has been my favorite Beta experience with Ubuntu – I seem to remember that there were several rounds of updates with Gutsy that broke – I have only seen one this go-around, and I was fortunate enough to miss the release, and hit it on the recall.  Basically, a kernel update pushed out, but the restricted-modules package was recalled.  I was able to install the kernel, but was unable to run X with my current config, since the fglrx driver had not been updated.  Four hours later, all was well, and I had the new (and now current) kernel.  Granted, there is still time.In the mean time, however, I can safely say that I believe Hardy to be the best Ubuntu yet.  /cs

UPDATE 080418:  Six days until release.  All still goes well.  Except that my sleeparound.sh script doesn’t work anymore.  I’ll try it out again this weekend, and see what I can do to fix it. In the mean time, I’ve grown an affinity for opaque terminal windows.    All is still well in the land of Hardy Beta, though.  I even found a workaround for the FF3 issue I was having (meaning that I needed FF2 for some stuff at work, no bug there.)  I came across one of Mark Shuttleworth’s blog entries that I found to be interesting.  It relates Mark’s ideas about infiltrating the Windows environment with Free and Open Source Software, siting that the most successful open-source software projects are multi-platform, not Linux specific.  I find this to be very concise and correct embodiment of why I still *occassionally* use Microsoft Windows for one thing or another (read: iTunes).  By keeping up with the goings-on of my previous-primary OS, I am able to help my wife, my Uncle Phil, and my Grandmother-in-law (yes, that’s right) realize the benefits of Open Source.  I have even converted one of them to a fully-Linux-operated-computer, with no Windows!  What a day that was!  /cs –p.s. – Shortly after writing this I remembered that I had not altered the /etc/default/acpi-support file, and that was why my sleeparound.sh script did not work.  It does now.  Ubuntu rules.  /cs